Evening Hymns – Heavy Nights
Shuffling Feet Records – 26 June 2020
Evening Hymns is the ever-evolving musical journey of Canadian musician, composer and producer, Jonas Bonnetta. Heavy Nights was self-produced at his rural studio retreat in Eastern Ontario and is the first release under this name since 2015, it occupies similar tonal textures and territory as Tim Buckley with its heady melodies and yearning vocals.
Keyboard notes open proceedings with I Can Only Be Good, which, set against Joseph Shabason’s moody saxophone, sketches the end of a relationship and falling out of love. It cautions about protecting yourself from the inevitable pain from the start as he sings “I don’t want to fall in love / Don’t tell me about your favourite films / Or the winter that you spent in Spain”. And yet, again traced through the neon-lit late-night streets ambience of the keyboards and sax, the title track, here with hints of Cohen and José Contreras supplying the fiery guitar crescendo, finds him succumbing to romance, the album marking a new metamorphosis in his life that now finds him a father, his new partner (Caylie Runciman, who sings and plays bass) giving birth during the recording process (though, one trusts, not literally).
One of four tracks pushing past five minutes, Pyrenees, which ventures close to a dance beat while sax wails down the alley, was written between France and Spain while on tour, the geographical transitioning mirroring the move from heartache and new love. There’s a reflection on things lost too, the low key elegiac piano-based The Days Disintegrating, on which sister Rachel also sings, references his late father and how they worked together trucking across the Ontario. On a similar note, it’s followed, in turn, by YouI Dreams which, featuring sax and Phil Charbonneau on bass, recalls a dream he had in which his father, clearly sick, arrived at the house and got to meet his dog, seeing his son’s life in a way that never happened in reality.
There’s a musical shift for My Drugs, My Dreams which brings in a 707 drum machine, vintage Korg synthesiser and vocal pads to weave warm, dreamlike musical shapes while, the longest track and third in a row to feature dreams in the title, Kiss My Dreams put me in mind of the floating, ethereal ash of Procol Harum
It ends with the late-night languid lullaby of Halfway To The Moon which, featuring an 1888 upright piano from a hotel bar, returns to the notion of new life, recalling being at a New York fuel station and learning he was going to be a father contemplating “all the things we cannot know” and how “if the only goal is love, then I guess we’re doing fine“. A contemplative work, these are the sort of nights and dreams you want to lose yourself in, offering calm and catharsis, and the awakening to a brighter tomorrow.
Pre-Order Heavy Nights: https://ffm.to/heavynights
Photo Credit: Caylie Runciman